In an interview with Brian Solis, Jesse James Garrett, the founder of Adaptive Path and author of The Elements of User Experience talks about user experience design and the way it has shifted from simple interface design towards a more holistic perspective, where imagined experiences are at the heart of product strategy decisions. In the old era, such decisions were takes from a technological perspective only and customer experience was something that was thought to be stored away in different silos within an organisation.

Today he identifies a much more holistic approach in which lateral touchpoints between different parts of the organization (could be design people talking to customer service people in order to reveal user experience pain points) allow for better user experiences. The simple, but very important argument he makes is that if we want to make good user experience design, then user experience design is not something that can be isolated to a single unit (or individual).

He also touches upon the difference between innovation and novelty, arguing that the criteria for innovation should be tied to human needs and motivations rather than a weird fascination of things that are just novel.

If you have 11 minutes to spend, consider spending them on this. It’s clever stuff.

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